Where Did All The Real Boxers Go?

Robert Farley wonders why boxing has become irrelevant, noting that a decade ago, he could always name the four or five gladiators battling for the heavyweight title while, today, he's got no idea which bruiser's in the white trunks. Fair enough. But he's wrong to think that the slide has been in the past decade, it's been over the past century. He might have known Lennox Lewis, Evander Holyfield, and Mike Tyson, but odds are he didn't care much about them. They were just famous.

A generation before that, though, boxers were titans, with genuine sociocultural resonance. Muhammad Ali, of course, but Joe Frasier, George Foreman, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis, Max Schmelling, Rocky Marciano, James Braddock...somehow, these guys got charged with something beyond superstardom -- they were champions of a particular class, or race, or ethos. It'd be easy to blame the sport's decline on the civil rights movement, but Marciano and Braddock spoke for whites, not blacks. The confrontations were clashes of civilizations, proxy battles for wars we were afraid would actually break out.

Whether the gradual deevolution of boxers into simple stars, and then mere athletes, is evidence that society is rivened by fewer such tensions, I'm not sure, but nothing's really emerged to take boxing's place, so either the need for such an outlet vanished or we've got something of a pressure cooker waiting to erupt.